Dorothy Morton

(London 1905-1999 East Anglia)

Mother & Child, c. mid-1950s

oil on canvas

signed lower right 'D. MORTON'

67 x 56 cm. (unframed)

in its original purpose-built box frame, 91 x 71 cm.

with a hand-written label by the artist, verso: '19/ MOTHER & CHILD/ Lent by/ Mrs Ross'

Exhibited

Bury St. Edmund's, Bury St. Edmund's Art Gallery, 'Dorothy Morton: Retrospective', 1983, no.19.

Provenance

Presumably acquired directly from the artist;

Mrs Ross, East Anglia, and by descent until 2023.

Dorothy Morton grew up in London and attended the Art Teachers' Training College in Clapham in the 1920s, later studying under Archibald Standish Hartrick and Dora Billington at the Central School of Arts & Crafts before and during World War II.

To earn a living she taught art, but in the late 1960s returned to her studies under her friend, Cedric Morris and his partner, Arthur-Lett Haines, at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing which they had established at their home in Benton End, Suffolk, with the belief that everyone could be creative, with no distinction between amateur or professional.

Morton was a member of the Cambridge Drawing Society, Colchester Art Society (with group shows at the Minories in Colchester), Sudbury Art Society and Gainsborough House Print Workshop. There was a retrospective exhibition of her work at Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery in 1983, to which this painting was loaned, but she is woefully underrepresented and forgotten today.

Examples of her paintings were recently shown at an exhibition in collaboration with the Colchester Art Society, at Firstsite Gallery in Colchester, December 2021-April 2022, Life with Art: Benton End and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.